About this site

Health Educator Inquiry Learning Project:

Inquiry Based Teaching: Equipping Teachers to Use Inquiry Activities within a Secondary Health Education Curriculum.

This website represents my sabbatical project, during which I researched teacher training in inquiry-based instruction, created learning experiences for health teachers to gain teaching skills in inquiry-based instruction, and developed inquiry-based activities for the secondary classroom focused on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections and risky behavior. The sections of this website contain interactive PowerPoints for use by teachers for development of teacher skills in inquiry activities (facilitating group work, asking questions, etc.), creating PowerPoints that contribute to student learning, student activities that can be performed inside and/or outside of class, templates for creation of student activities using PowerPoint, and several inquiry-based lesson plan ideas for reproductive health instruction.

Why Inquiry Teaching?

Inquiry-based learning is a “hands on, minds on” (Pottenger, 2007) approach to helping students integrate information and reflect on and internalize that information through a series of interactive problem-solving experiences. Inquiry-based learning is based on the multiple ways we discover, invent, and test answers and solutions to questions and problems and make conclusions about their usefulness. This means that students are engaged in analyzing a problem, hypothesizing a solution, designing a way to test the hypothesis, and assessing the results of the test to draw conclusions about the “answers” to the problem. These activities mirror problem-solving approaches to learning but go beyond that by using teachers as coaches who support the learners as they take ownership of the problem and its solution. This type of learning encourages student dispositions such as responsibility, respect for the ideas of others, open-mindedness, and critical thinking (Pottenger, 2007).